Fashion|'Fashion Truly Deserves to Be Loved and Loathed': Readers on Fashion in the Age of the Smartphone

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'Fashion Truly Deserves to Be Loved and Loathed': Readers on Fashion in the Age of the Smartphone

By VALERIYA SAFRONOVAFEB. 18, 2016

As New York Fashion Week kicked off last Thursday, the Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman addressed the industry's existential crisis in "How Smartphones Are Killing Off the Fashion Show." She wrote that "the system of showing clothes on a runway, then selling them in stores six months later, seems increasingly irrelevant in the age of social media." Readers responded on nytimes.com/styles and on Facebook. The comments below have been edited for space. Related Article

As New York Fashion Week kicked off last Thursday, the Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman addressed the industry's existential crisis in "How Smartphones Are Killing Off the Fashion Show." She wrote that "the system of showing clothes on a runway, then selling them in stores six months later, seems increasingly irrelevant in the age of social media." Readers responded on nytimes.com/styles and on Facebook. The comments below have been edited for space.

Photo

Credit
Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times

Brick and mortar retailers need to compete with internet sales by making their stores a destination. Add pubs and cafes in the stores, make them places to see and be seen, where fashion is on display … by the shopping customers. Make the store a scene.

Also, fashion needs to be interactive with a smartphone. When someone is in a store, or at a fashion show, the phone should be used to enhance the experience, not a distraction taking people away from the clothes, and sales.

PE, Seattle, WA

Whenever in a title it is written the word “killing,” well this is not going to happen. Fashion system started in the ’40s and ’50s with small shows just for clients, usually rich women. Then there was the transition towards the designers, from the ’60s till the ’90s, with the star system and the model system. The holdings took the helm from the late ’90s until today and they are here to stay changing already the environment dramatically. Red carpets are already more impacting the large audience than the catwalks. Last if a designer does not sell within two/three seasons he/she is done. What is going to change is the supply chain more than the shows themselves. This is where the game will be played.

Gianandrea Facchini, Florence, Italy

If designers are designing for retail, then make your designs, invest in some inventory to produce them, show them and then bank on the fact that some will sell more than others to even out your losses, just like most products do. Even record labels, photography and modeling agencies and grocery stores work this way. You’ve got a few stars on the brand that are the hitmakers and then the rest might sell less but have a more faithful fan base over time.

Then, it will take the power out of the retailers hands to dictate what gets bought and what doesn’t and they will be clamoring to buy what everyone is buying directly. It will put the customers at the designers’ doorstep like Apple.

I Am Blank, Brooklyn

I hope this also means that stores will stop selling spring/summer merch in January. I am not in the market for a 25K embroidered jacket, but I’d like to buy a sweater when it’s cold out and not in August.

ml, nyc

Ah, the travails of the idle rich. Every single person I know has managed to clothe him/herself quite nicely without paying any attention, ever, to so-called fashion shows. So let the rich, with their overstuffed closets, wrinkle their nose at something un-new, or the dismal prospect of ever having to wear the same thing twice.

In the meantime, make yourselves useful: Clean out your closets of all the coats, sweaters and jackets you wore once and therefore can never wear again. Bring them to a local shelter, Salvation Army or Goodwill collection point. It’s mighty cold out there this week, and some of your fellow citizens won’t mind staying warm in last week’s (ewwww!) clothing.

alexander hamilton, new york

Fashion shows are like concept car shows. Just ideas and gimmicks. 99% never see the light of day. Even when they do, they are tamed down.

Chris Mills

As long as the fashion industry is dominated by egomaniacs, runway shows will continue to exist. These shows perpetuate the petty hierarchy within the fashion industry, where people vie for tickets to the hottest shows and jockey for seats in the first row. God forbid you sit in the third row or must stand!

This juvenile social system only stifles creativity and, secretly, everyone hates it. It pushes away the most creative and inventive voices and embraces the sycophantic ones. A sad, sad dynamic perpetuated by these shows.

al, nyc

The fashion industry only has itself to blame. It took the weeks where it held its industrial conventions/shows and made it a consumer event. “Fashion Week” did not exist 30 years ago. It was named “Fashion Week” by those who were trying to get publicity for what was before only made for industrial and haute couture interest. Now, years later, the consumer looks forward to seeing photos from these events — with the expected result that now the consumers are in charge instead of the buyers.

Da, West Palm Beach

When I read that the fashion houses “aim to deliver clothes in-season the month” after the show, all I can wonder is how this is going to affect the people working in sweatshops across the globe. Fashion truly deserves to be loved and loathed.

Jules T, Chicago, IL

Six months ago, The Times reported that Americans are spending discretionary income on “experiences, not material goods,” and that, except for the wealthiest category, the accumulation of stuff has become a burden, rather than a pleasure. No one I know on either coast or in the “upper Middle” shops in department stores or even high-end retail. Instagram is full of unique, tiny collections — and if you can’t find them or afford them, you can create them yourself via the inspiring photographs and a few trips to the top charity thrift shops (where superior quality in both fabric and wear has been donated by the 1%). It’s a game, and the goal is to represent yourself, not a label.